The purpose of the paper is to explore the viability of employing Speech Act Phrase structure to explain “-kes kath-ta” constructions in Korean. Based on the argument that interfacing between syntax and conversational pragmatics is established through a functional predicative structure which is projected through the syntacticization of speech act features, we suggest that the speech act layer for “-kes kath-ta” constructions is needed as a predicative structure encoding the conversational set-up to interpret the utterance compositionally.

• Chegyung Im(Daegu Arts University)